I have no excuse. None. The last week, except for taking neighbor Phillip to some stores in Gig Harbor last (Tuesday?) and spending most of Wednesday working on that damned MediaServer the whole week is a total blur. I have absolutely NO idea what the hell I did all week. Other than normal housework type stuff.

Haven’t been going out to the property as much as I usually would during fairly nice weather as the price of gas is just too damned high. So I’ve been hanging around the house. Boring! Oh, I always seem to have plenty to do: scan pictures, work on my web sites, rip dvd’s and convert them to avi files or cook dinner. But I never seem to get as much done as I want. Nor do I seem to get as much done as I’d thought.

Speaking of thoughts: had an important one the other day. Forgotten what the hell it was now.

So, I think I’m at the point that I really need to make myself a schedule. Or get a job. I’d look for a job except I’d have to quit it if we started building our dome as I’ll be doing quite a bit of the work on it. Just can’t see going through all the hassle of finding a job and getting someone to depend on me only to quit if we get financing and start building. Not fair to whoever hired me.

And I need a bigger truck and a trailer to start my own dirt moving business. Maybe I can find something that’ll make me some money on the internet?…

OTOH, if I set myself up a schedule of ’classes’ maybe I can finally learn some of the stuff I have piled up on my shelves to learn. Morse Code and the stuff for my Ham license, HTML & CSS, PHP & MySQL and a bit of College Accounting. I also have XML for Dummies, Photoshop CS3 for Dummies, Flash 5 and a weekend crash course in MySQL up there.

Did manage to get up to the property yesterday & today. Yesterday was just too nice to do much of anything so I pushed some dirt around but mostly layed out in the sun reading. Today was much too cool and windy to lay out so I cut up about 2 truck loads of wood. Brought one back and unloaded it already. Watching

"Secrets of Saturn" and waiting for SWMBO to cook dinner tonight. Chied Fricken. Cool!

Oh, SWMBO took us to see the latest "Narnia" movie last Friday then we went and had "Mall Food" for a late lunch. Movie was okay; special effects were cool, but I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. And it wasn’t Indiana Jones!

And there’s only 26 more days until my 56th Birthday. Bummer! (But it beats the alternative all to hell!)

Oh yeah, saw a real B17 fly overhead on my way into town last weekend. Cool. That’s one of my favorite planes to ’fly’ in FSX. Then out at the property I heard someone fire off a fully automatic M16 somewhere in the neighborhood.

Wow, Times goes by quickly when you’re having fun!

Last Friday SWMBO wanted to have BBQ at "Fat Rascal’s"; but when we got there for lunch the place was closed. Notice on the door about owing back taxes and being closed until further notice. Bummer! Their BBQ is great! So SWMBO drug me down the street to a restaurant that’s opened recently; Gino’s. Talk about delusions of grandeur! The "1/2 sandwich & soup" I had was definitely not worth $14! Bread was too thick, Ham was too thin and there wasn’t enough "stuff" on it. The soup was "Salmon Bisque" and the first 3-4 bites were good. After that the Bay leaf took over and ruined it. SWMBO had the ’chicken alfredo’ and didn’t eat all the chicken because they used the dark meat. GREAT view of the bay and the mountains but the atmosphere (and food) sucked. And really, coming from a ’poor’ man’s point of view; we weren’t served enough food to be worth the $30 we spent there.

But, as with any usual ’date night’, the best part was just spending time with SWMBO.

Yesterday, Saturday, the weather persons predicted it was going to rain with the possibility of thunder and lightning. Was actually happened was damn near 80 degree’s and sunny. So I spent the day laying out up at the property. Oh, I loaded my truck up with wood I’d cut earlier to make the trip, uh, ’financially feasible’ or worthwhile but otherwise I just layed out trying to burn my ass off. Was great! I mean it was nice up there.

But all good things must end so I got home about 1700. SWMBO wasn’t home from taking our son to COSTCO so I unloaded the truck and started up the lawn mower and mowed the front lawn. Usually, SWMBO mows and I do laundry/dishes. Front lawn was getting pretty overgrown though so I jumped in to give a hand. SWMBO came home as I was putting new cutter string thingies on the mower and took over the mowing. Sokay with me!

Today, Sunday, was my normal first session of church (where I sang particularly well if I do say so myself) then on out to the property. One of the guys gave a talk in which he says: "There are Brothers in leadership positions in the church that refuse to do Home Teaching and I don’t believe they ought to be able to hold a position of authority for their refusal." Well, Brother Bob, I can agree but mostly disagree. I don’t want a Home Teacher that comes over ONLY because he HAS to. I’d rather he just stayed home. (His home.) Some people can’t relate to the family’s they’re assigned to. Some people are uncomfortable around other people or trying to ’teach a lesson.’ Some folks just plain uneasy visiting other people’s homes. Whatever the reason; if they don’t want to I’d rather they didn’t come over. Other than that his talk was disjointed and didn’t seem to keep to the subject he first stated he was going to talk about. Another one of those people that feel they have to mention every damned thing they can mention scripturally in one talk.

The rest of the day went pretty normally for me. Nice out at the property (was supposed to have thunder, lightning and rain again) so I layed out some more (after loaded another load of wood in the truck). Some folks have found the old gravel pit across the road from our property and set up camp and were running their dirt bikes all over down by the river. None came on our property thank goodness. Left there around 1500 to come home and spend some time with SWMBO before she had to take off for choir practice. Was nice.

Spent the evening playing with Vista and installing all the expansion pacs for FSX. Installed X-Plane, FS 2002 & Magix Music Maker also. Running out of space on the hard drive and it still won’t recognize my drives attached to that Rocket IDE controller. But, I did install Vista on this drive just to test it. So far it’s worked pretty good with all the programs I normally use. Only had a couple of programs crash.

Around here. Well, except for completely removing everything from the livingl room last Monday and running a carpet cleaner across it a couple of times then puttin’ everything back. That pretty much took up Monday and was covered in greater detail in an earlier post…

Tues & Wed Not much going on except for getting things back into the living room that I forgot Monday. It rained like a son-of-a-bitch for about 5 minutes one of those days. Can’t remember which one. Water was coming out of the down spout off from the gutter like someone had turned a fire hydrant on the roof.

Got Windows Vista Ultimate and installed it on one of my smaller (120G) "spare" drives and have been playing with it. I kind of like it but that little box that keeps popping up and asking me if I want to continue or not is BUGGING THE HELL OUTTA ME! Who’s Damned Stupid Idea was that anyway? Of course, I can’t get Vista to recognize my extra ide controller so I lose two drives when I put the Vista drive in and boot. And the Rocket folks don’t make a driver for Vista yet. That built in Media Center looks (and works) pretty good though. Once I got the network set up and connected to our workspace it read the media drives pretty well. Can’t get my ATI remote control to work on MY computer, but I don’t have an ATI videocard installed. Maybe it’ll work on the MediaServer where the ATI card is installed. Anywho, I’m going to play with it (Vista!) until I break it before I switch over completely from XP. If I ever do switch over that is…

Believe it or not it’s Thursday night and I haven’t watched Smallville at all. But that’s the way I usually do it though; once the Season Ender shows I don’t turn "The CW" back on until the next Season Premiere. Damn, except for History/Discovery/NatGeo and Battlestar Galactica I’m not watching much regular tv. It’s just not worth the commercial time for me anymore. And with the MediaServer it’s ever so easy to pick a folder of videos I want to watch and hit play. I really need to get a couple of terabyte drives for the MediaServer though. I’m running out of room to put stuff. So, unless drives get really big (really big) and cheap (really cheap) I’ll probably wind up having to have a bunch of external drives anyway. Bummer!

But then half the time it’s not like I’m sitting still and watching tv anyway. It’s mostly noise in the background and a momentary distraction when needed from ’playing;’ on my computer. Websites to check, blogs to post, PHP/MySQL/accounting/Photoshop/CSS/HTML to learn. Not to mention Morse Code and all the stuff I need to know for a Ham License. (Glad I didn’t mention it!) Tonight I even spent an hour trying to find out why SWMBO’s Zune won’t connect with WMP. Damned Frustrating! The first Zune program was the easiest to use and WORKED. Why did they have to change it? I know that’s the definition of Microsoft though; take something easy and make it use a lot of computer resources to the point of bogging the system down and make it difficult to use. Otherwise it’d be Linux!